Researchers who watched the unveiling say Elon Musk's Tesla flying car did rise, and that a moth's new route is the result that counts.
A lab watched Elon Musk unveil Tesla's flying car at SpaceX and scored the clip twenty-six times. The car rose, which the team filed under weather. The result they will defend is a moth that left its lamp and did not come back.
A moth above the SpaceX yard bent its path when the thrusters on Elon Musk's Tesla car lit the concrete. It shifted twenty-six body lengths to the left and did not come back to the lamp. That is the finding we are willing to defend. The rise of the car we filed under weather.
Elon Musk showed the machine during a livestream at his rocket site and told the viewers it could fly. We played that clip twenty-six times so the watching would count as a sample rather than a glance. A single pass had felt like a guess.
Our control group was twenty-six moths by a warehouse lamp with no car under it. They flew in the ordinary way. None of them made a turn we could put a number on.
Thrusters sit on the body of the car, and they fired while the stream was still live. The car rose, and the broadcast moved on without treating the lift as a surprise. We have nothing new to say about up.
"The moth is the crisis," said Dr. Lila Venn, who keeps the yard insect log. "A car going up is dull. Up already has a whole sky attached to it."
Write-ups of the unveiling match the stream we scored, including the account of the Tesla car and the note on what flying it would ask of aviation rules. We are not disputing that the event happened. We are disputing which part of it matters.
We checked how often a moth swerves that hard beside a loud machine by pure chance. The chance was small. Researchers call that figure a p-value, which only means the result probably was not luck, and ours was 0.026.
What we are bored by
Flight, in the lab book, is a routine slight against the floor and not a reason to clear the calendar. The thrusters did what a thruster is built to do. Nobody under the control lamp got the same slight, and they carried on with the evening as if air were normal.
"We did not budget for insects," said Harun Peck, who speaks for the thruster crew. "The car did the job. A moth that wants a new route can take that up with the air."
On Wednesday the team will stand under that lamp and wait to see if the moth has forgiven the yard. If it is still gone, we will mark a habitat loss the size of a napkin and close the file. The car can keep its small talent for leaving the ground. Coming back down has never required a new study.
